Set in the waning years of imperial China, those salad days when the feudal lettuce was turning brown, Yim Ho's "Pavilion of Women" is loaded with little love croutons, and they're all stale. Aside from making the distracting choice to render his film in English (thus avoiding any danger of revisionism), Yim makes a soap opera of Pearl Buck's portrait of a lady scorned for proclaiming her independence.

This version is a well-meant but corny distillation -- a whole lot of bombast and phony exaltation in the name of entertaining enrichment. Light- years more runny than the female-social-bondage films of, say, Zhang Yimou ("Ju Dou"), "Pavilion of Women" is a pageant of opulent, self-conscious choices.

At the heart of the saga is Madame Wu (co-writer and co-producer Luo Yan). As a 40th birthday present to herself, she gives her husband a concubine -- sorry, whose birthday is it? This second wife is a simple country girl (Yi Ding) young enough to be the couple's daughter, but the perfect age for their communist son Fengmo (John Cho). Not far into the proceedings, Willem Dafoe wanders onto the scene as a priest hired to tutor Fengmo, and the suds generator is kicked into highest gear. Love, that most forbidden topic, tries to bring priest and matriarch together.

Father Andre is the only white guy in town, and when a gaggle of Wu women get a load of him, a din of half-horrified giggles erupts. Have they seen "Shadow of the Vampire"?

It takes Madame Wu the entire last act to savor the notion of falling into Andre's arms. But tragedy (in the form of Japanese fighter planes) has already taken to the skies, putting a stop to whatever dramatic sweep there is. Amid the other anachronisms, where are the protest signs saying, "Make love, not suds?"

Following last year's "Humanite" -- Bruno Dumont's hulking metaphysical study of one cop's peculiarities amid a growing body count -- is Shinji Aoyama's "Eureka." It takes a second to say and 217 minutes to unfold. You feel time slipping through your fingers, but, gorgeous and studied to a fault, the film doesn't give you time to look down at your hands.

Shot with desaturated color stock, "Eureka" appears sun-baked and sepia, befitting a film whose three principal characters are grappling with loss. A psycho opens fire on a bus, sparing only the driver, Makoto (the profound Koji Yakusho), and Kozue and Naoki, an eerily close sister and brother (real-life siblings Aoi and Masaru Miyazaki). The resulting post-traumatic stress takes on a dream life of its own, and on parallel tracks, no less. A few years later,

Makoto's wife leaves him; the children's mother leaves them. He withdraws into further passivity; they withdraw into silence. Eventually, he moves into their house, and the healing begins.

The film is a plaintive weave of premillennial dysfunction (of which that bus-jacker is a symptom) and postmillennial reconciliation. Aoyama uses the rest of the narrative as an empathic collapse of the void between the two. The ecology weeps more than in a Terrence Malick movie. Clearly versed in the ways John Ford could turn earth into thriving, soulfully Panavision vistas, the film even has the denuded, telling silence of a Western -- wide angles and long takes. To be sure, the cicadas speak more than the characters. And in its own unassuming way, the film, which devotes its last act to a redemptive road trip, is spiritual kin to "The Searchers."

There's a serial-killer side plot that tenses up the mood while echoing Japan's recent inexplicable acts of violence. But with his doubt and cynicism cast aside, Aoyama starts at a psychic end of the world and optimistically tries to find a way back to the beginning. The view is incredible.

"The Price of Milk" is a whimsical modern fairy tale from New Zealand, about a young engaged couple who live on a dairy farm. The setting is appealing, and so are the cows. That's something going in.

The movie has other virtues. The day-to-day aspect of running a dairy is interesting to watch, and the incongruous soundtrack -- filled with Russian classical music from the turn of the century, such as Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead" -- gives the movie an indefinable something, a haunting quality.

Too bad that unconscious haunting quality is in no way conveyed by the story, which soon reveals itself not as magical but silly -- and even irritating. "The Price of Milk" might have been a better experience were it made up of pictures, a soundtrack and no dialogue.

Karl Urban plays Rob, the young farmer, a scruffy softie who is sweet to all living creatures, including his girlfriend, his dog and his cows. Lucinda (Danielle Cormack) is also kind, but a bit of a nitwit. One day she accidentally runs over a magical old Maori woman, who gets up uninjured but from then on makes it her mission to disturb Danielle's peace of mind.

While the lovers are in bed, the Maori lady has her sons sneak in and steal the quilt. To get the quilt back, Lucinda gives her all of Rob's cows. Lucinda thinks nothing of this, and thereafter, the audience thinks nothing of Lucinda.

"The Price of Milk" isn't arresting in the moment, and it has no metaphorical weight. It is not airy so much as airheaded.

The quality of the light is so splendid in San Francisco that people here should easily identify with the title of this affectionate portrait of Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, "Light Keeps Me Company."

"You can see the air in his movies," says Roman Polanski, one of many colleagues who provide insight into the 78-year-old Nykvist's long career. This film, by his son Carl-Gustaf, coincidentally provides a revealing look at Ingmar Bergman. The Swedish director, now retired and at first appearing subdued, comes to life talking about his old collaborator. When they worked together, they were on the same wavelength, and few words were needed.

The secret of Nykvist's keen eye was that he "managed to hang onto his naivete," says actress Liv Ullmann. It is no accident that his favorite book is Hesse's "Siddhartha," about the prince-turned-Buddha "who looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time."

The tragedies of Nykvist's life are touched on, too. When a son committed suicide, he turned to actress Mia Farrow for comfort. Later, it was difficult for him to work with Bergman admirer Woody Allen because of Allen's connection with Farrow. After shooting 97 films, including Philip Kaufman's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," Nykvist gave it up with the onset of aphasia, a form of dementia that affects linguistic ability.

Bergman and Nykvist's 1966 film "Persona" is also at the Rafael in a new print that not only provides a glorious example of Nykvist's range in black and white but also has new subtitles that are truer to the original language.